The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Lawrence J. Hogan Sr., Maryland Republican who called for Nixon’s impeachment, dies at 88
Lawrence J. Hogan Sr., a combative Prince George’s County politician who rose to national prominence in 1974 by being the first GOP member of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee to call for President Richard M. Nixon’s impeachment, died April 20. He was 88.
His son, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan Jr. (R). announced the death on Facebook. A spokesman for the governor said the elder Hogan died at Anne Arundel Medical Center of complications from a stroke.
In more than 25 years in county and Maryland politics, Hogan cultivated an image as a scrappy politician with an instinct for the jugular and as a rightwing Republican who cemented his political career by wooing Democrats.
First as a three-term congressman and later as Prince George’s County executive, Hogan was dogged by controversy and disdained by some Republicans and Democrats as an opportunist who mounted one bandwagon after another in search of political prominence.
Hogan was a Kennedy Democrat during the 1960 presidential race, then switched parties mid-campaign to become a Nixon supporter. He joined the tiny Prince George’s County Republican Party but publicly attacked the leadership as being content to grow “fat and happy living off the crumbs of the Democratic banquet table,” as he once told The Washington Post.
In his first bid for Congress, in 1966, Hogan, a former FBI agent, used private investigators to unearth information that played a role in the indictment of Democratic County Commissioner Jesse S. Baggett in a zoning corruption scandal. Although Hogan lost that congressional race, the publicity from the Baggett indictment helped pave the way for his success in 1968.
Sensing the shifting of the political winds in Prince George’s as the county changed in the mid-1960s from a rural, white working-class suburb to an increasingly urbanized community with a growing black population, Hogan attracted white Democrats to his campaign by championing conservative causes, including support for Nixon’s anti-crime bills.
In 1970, Hogan was reelected to Congress with 60 percent of the vote by embracing the Vietnam War; his opponent, state Sen. Royal Hart, was a peace candidate. Two years later, Hogan rallied white Democrats to his campaign as he led the fight against busing to integrate the county’s schools.
His most controversial move, one that brought him national attention but severely strained his credibility within the Republican Party, was when Hogan deserted the Nixon camp the day before the House Judiciary Committee was to begin debate on impeachment in July 1974 and announced at a news conference that he favored removing the president from office.
As syndicated columnist George F. Will wrote at the time: “Mr. Hogan’s announcement was, for the White House, an experience comparable to being slugged on the base of the skull with a sock full of wet sand.”
Hogan, who was a gubernatorial candidate and was largely unknown in Maryland outside of Prince George’s, followed up with a statewide television broadcast that night. The stand helped cost him the Republican primary — incumbent Democrat Marvin Mandel won the general election — and stalled his political career.
Hogan was quoted then as saying the move was a calculated gamble to gain statewide publicity at the risk of alienating Republican voters. But in a 1987 interview, Hogan denied he called for Nixon’s impeachment to help his election campaign.
“I assumed that in coming out for impeachment, I would lose the nomination, which I did,” he said. “It had absolutely nothing to do with politics. I still resent people saying that now.”
Hogan said he believed his announcement, the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on the secret White House tapes and the alienation of Southern Democrats were the three key factors that convinced Nixon to resign in August 1974.
Lawrence Joseph Hogan was born in Boston on Sept. 30, 1928, and grew up in Washington. His father, a bookbinder, was a Democrat and ardent trade unionist.
Hogan graduated from Gonzaga College High School in 1946 and from Georgetown University in 1949. He received a law degree from Georgetown in 1954 and a master’s degree in public relations from American University in the mid-1960s.
Hogan joined the FBI in 1948, while still in college, and spent a decade with the law-enforcement agency. He then started a public relations firm and taught public relations at the University of Maryland in the 1960s.
After a four-year hiatus from elected office, Hogan was ready to return to public life in 1978. Prince George’s was growing quickly, with the population nearly doubling from 1960 to 1970. Property owners were facing escalating taxes to meet the demand for additional schools, new social programs and more county workers.
Inspired by California’s success in passing the budget-restraining Proposition 13, local leaders in 1978 pushed through the Tax Reform Initiative by Marylanders. TRIM was one of the most restrictive tax-control measures passed during the national tax revolt of the late 1970s.
Hogan seized upon the budget-cutting issue and made it the focal point of his 1978 campaign. Brandishing a report on how he could cut the county budget by $43 million, he castigated county leaders as spendthrifts. He was elected by a 3-to-2 margin over incumbent Winfield M. Kelly Jr.
As county executive, Hogan sliced into the budget with vigor, even going below the mandated level. More than 3,000 jobs were eliminated, including those of 507 teachers; the budgets for libraries and schools were pared; and spending on the infrastructure fell to crisis levels.
From the start, Hogan’s relationship with the County Council was bitter. There were fights over political appointments, including the rejection of Hogan’s choice for police chief, and one infamous moment when Hogan, in a fit of rage, threatened to geld council Chairman Parris Glendening, who eventually succeeded him. Glendening, a Democrat, served as Maryland governor from 1995 to 2003.
Tussles with county labor leaders led in 1980 to the first strike in Prince George’s history, in which 1,500 county employees walked out for 11 days. Amid this tumult, a prisoners’ riot at the county jail took place. Hogan fired 121 jail guards, and the remaining employees went back to work without a contract.
Hogan blamed his troubles on partisan politics. As the only Republican in office in a heavily Democratic county, he said in an interview in 1987, he felt like “Horatio at the bridge, fending off the hordes.”
Hogan was able to hand property owners large tax cuts, reducing the tax rate 20 percent during his four-year tenure. By the time he left office in 1982, the growth rate of the county budget was 40 percent lower, and there were 2,400 fewer public employees. He also was credited with cleaning up low-income housing.
In Hogan’s final shot at public office — a 1982 campaign for the U.S. Senate — many of the ghosts of his past came back to haunt him. He got into trouble when he was slow to repudiate National Conservative Political Action Committee television ads calling incumbent Sen. Paul Sarbanes too liberal for Maryland.
Hogan insisted the ads had nothing to do with his campaign while at the same time saying he welcomed support from any group that said nice things about him. The ad campaign backfired, and the Democrats gained support and money. Hogan received only tepid support from the GOP establishment.
After the voters rejected him by a 2-to-1 margin, Hogan seemed to lose the will to “do battle with the gorilla” of government, and retired quietly from public life. He moved to Frederick, Maryland, and opened a law firm with Ilona Modly, his former press secretary, whom he had married in 1974.
His first marriage, to Nora Maguire, ended in divorce.
Besides Modly and Larry Hogan Jr., survivors include two sisters, Mary O’Connell of Wheaton and Audrey Love of Alexandria, Virginia; one brother, William Hogan of Ashburn; four sons from his second marriage, Matthew Hogan of Costa Rica, Michael Hogan of Oregon, Patrick Hogan of Frederick, Md., and Timothy Hogan of Annapolis; 11 grandchildren; and 10 great-grandchildren.
A daughter from his first marriage, Mary Theresa Lazarus, died in 2016.
While campaigning for governor in 2014, and after he was elected, Hogan Jr., a longtime real estate executive, paid frequent tribute to his father’s stance against Nixon during the Watergate scandal. The governor wrote in his father’s name on the presidential ballot in November 2016 rather than vote for either of the major party candidates.
“He taught me more about integrity in one day than most men learn in a lifetime, and I’m proud to be his son,” Hogan Jr. said.
In announcing his father’s death on Facebook, the governor called Hogan “an American hero.”